Frequently Asked Questions

What genres of music to you work with?
    Over the years I have worked with pretty much every genre of music and welcome it all. I have a lot of experience with rock, punk, metal, hip-hop, folk, country, r&b, dance and really everything in between.
What kind of equipment do you use?
What is audio mastering?
    At the audio mastering level we are no longer working with all the individual instrument tracks of a song but rather with the final stereo mix. Mastering involves balancing the overall frequencies and dynamics of an entire song to help it sound its best for the intended media. Mastering is also the time, when working with an album or collection of songs, that we try and make the songs sound their best together and prepare a CD master for replication.
Is audio mastering a service you provide?
    Absolutely, we master all of our finished mixes and the cost is often included in the mixing price. We are also happy to master audio that we haven’t recorded and do so quite often.
What is a DDP file?

DDP stands for Disc Description Protocol. It is an error-protected delivery format that has become industry standard for reliable CD replication.

The DDP image can be sent digitally to replication companies instead of a physical CD saving time and unlike audio CDs, DDPs can be checked to ensure that the data is 100% accurate.

What are your hours of operation?
    We are pretty flexible but generally try and keep within 9:00am-10:00pm 7days a week.
Do you do voice recording for video?
    Yes, we do very high quality voice recording for video. We have done promotional and informational videos for the oil and gas, dental and medical industries and also for Microsoft.
How much does it cost to record?
    The standard studio rate is $60 per hour for recording. Every project is different and it can be hard to predict exact costs but we always sit down with our artists to come up with a timeline and budget to accomplish their recording goals. Give us a call at 403-703-1830 to discuss your project and costs.
Do you make beats for hip hop and rap?

The short answer is no. The long answer is yes we can make something custom but its much more cost effective to purchase a beat from one of the many sites offing digital downloads. You can find beats for as low as $5 but i recommend reading the licensing and purchasing the ones that make sense for your project. When ever possible purchase the options that provide a high quality .wav file end even better if you can purchase the stems for the beat then that gives us much more flexibility during mix time.

Here a few recommended sites:

Is there anything to know before sending tracks for mixing?

1) Turn off processing and effects

Unless you want a very specific effect, you should turn off all processing and effects. Compression, reverb ect. can be easily added during mixing but it is very hard to remove if it is all ready present on a track. This is especially important for vocals. Sending processed tracks in addition to the raw track is also an option.

2) Clean up your tracks

Make sure everything you want in the mix is included. It is very disappointing to finish a mix and then find out that there is a missing guitar track or something that might change the mix significantly. Likewise, don’t send tracks that aren’t suppose to be part of the mix. Clearly labeling your tracks can speed up the process for your mixing engineer as well as make communication easier. After Exporting your tracks it is a good idea to re-import them into a new session and have a listen before sending to make sure everything sounds as intended.

3) Consolidate and Export

For each track, consolidate (merge) your audio regions / clips into a single audio track that starts at the beginning of the session. This is a very important step to do before exporting otherwise something like a guitar solo might end up in the wrong part of the song.

4) Bouncing tracks

Some DAW’s (digital audio workstations) don’t have an easy export option. In this case you may need to solo each track one by one and do a bounce / share to create the separated tracks for mixing.

5) Reference mix and material

Providing a rough mix of the song, if one exists, can be helpful. Also if your looking for a specific sound then sending some links to similar sounding songs for reference can also be helpful.

6) Comunicate

Mixing can be quite subjective so please be sure to communicate any special requests or guidance you want for you mix. After receiving a completed mix please evaluate it in a timely manor and let your mixing engineer know of any desired tweaks or changes.